Bing and RIM Team Up vs. Apple and Android

Bing and RIM, Blackberry phone maker, announced that they would be teaming up to offer integrated Bing products with the next lines of Blackberry phones. There are several million unique angles to this story and we’ll try to touch on some of the big ones.

Aahh! Flee, Androids and Apples! Bing and Blackberry on a bombing run!

First off, we’ll quickly note that the two biggest ways that we’ve discussed the web marketplace changing is in the rapid and rabid growth of mobile development and the crazy explosion of social network and social media importance. Each and everyone of these companies has something to gain by increased market share in either of these evolutions.

We all know that Apple has the biggest war chest currently in mobile device and smartphone platforms. They have one of the most expensive wholesale costs on the phone and tablet devices, and they control the manufacturing, Operating System (OS), and gain revenue from their increased charges on developers in the App store. With iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices having huge market penetration, they’re definitely one of, if not the, market giant to beat.

Android has a larger share of the market as a whole, but since its open source, its revenue and hardware costs are less depended on one specific company or manufacturer. Their explosive growth has, however, supplanted RIM and Blackberry as the largest portion of the smartphone market. Android also is a cute name for Google.

Android (Google) and Apple have the lead of the mobile development market in very important evaluations and statistics. That means they control a large portion of the web marketing revenue and access that has financial value, even outside of the handset or device sales. Microsoft’s Windows phones have always been unpopular and less well received then either of these two companies. Blackberry (RIM) used to be the big Kahuna but recently floundered as they over focused on their device development and marketing, and lost huge percentages of their customers to Google’s Android and Apple. Obviously, they’d like to get back to that point.

Blackberry has aggressively worked to increase its modernization through acquisition, buying up multiple startups with mobile application offerings or relevance to their product, and Microsoft has worked equally hard to produce profitability and direction for where it can go in the post PC world. Blackberry offers Microsoft a much larger user base, especially if it can become competitive once more, and Microsoft offers Blackberry in Bing a massive new feature set to incorporate into its product line.

This allows them to put out a more effective challenge in areas where they are traditionally weak, to companies like Apple and Google.